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Vanessa Beecroft, Barbie and Renaissance
Introduction
Italy, the country where Vanessa Beecroft grew up, studied painting and later visited drama classes, is also the origin of a great tradition of painting, sculpture, architecture and in more recent times of fashion design. Already as a young woman attending life-drawing courses, she was distinct of her fellow students in her approach to the model. She sat there and gazed at the naked girl during most of the time. She knew that she was supposed to be drawing. Occasionally, she would draw a few lines, but these were remote from reality. She felt more attracted to the model’s physical presence and simultaneous psychological unavailability. She then realised that she wanted to create something that was exceeding the marks of a pencil on a piece of paper or of a brush on a canvas. Something more complex and more powerful than that. (1) The following essay tries to outline these various cultural premises, which had a great Influence on her work, and to link them through Barbie, an icon of contemporary femininity, to popular culture.

Perfection, Identification and Shame

The first root connecting her work with the famous doll goes back to Renaissance. Renaissance painting underlying many of the compositional ideas of Vanessa Beecroft’s "tableaux vivants“ is also the period where in Paris the first sexualised fashion dolls saw the light. These dolls were neither young girls nor adolescents. They represented grown-up women. It is only in the 19th century that the baby doll made its appearance on the market and took over the leading position. Few fashion dolls were being produced at that time, but they were linked to high fashion in opposite to mainstream and thus regarded as luxury toys for upper-class girls. This situation lasted more or less until the invention of Barbie in the late fifties. Her creators came across Lilly, a German doll made as a sex symbol for men. Observing the fondness of their six-year-old daughter, Barbara, for the puppet, they thought it to be a good alternative for the development of young girls to the then common baby doll. (2) The most obvious link to childhood in Vanessa Beecroft’s work can be found in her drawings. Most of all in her diaries, which she kept for over eight years. They contain obsessive records of her eating habits, guilt feelings, psychiatric visits and comments on her parents. The drawings she included in her diaries show mostly prepubescent girls with wide eyed innocent faces lost in masses of yellow or red hair, contorted bodies, hands clutching at their throats, spitting black liquid or arms gesturing defensively. (3) The diaries are a testimony of her anorexia nervosa. Her eating disorder shows her struggle for a perfect body and may explain her possession for youthful girls of flawless beauty and absolute thinness. This “living material” remains constant in each of her performances. These cannons of proportions for a perfect human body were being revitalised during Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man or Alfred Dürer’s screen-grid drawings are an attempt to tame the ill-proportioned bodies into an organised form of representation. The aim was to create a body abstracted from its model. A figure composed of parts of different bodies, transcending nature’s imperfection. (4)

This classic and timeless figure has survived until today with some slight variations. One of those is our obsession for women to be skinny, probably resulting from the affluence of our society. (5) Barbie is a product of such an ideal. A composite body of sheer impossibility, if transposed into reality. This superlative body earns her much adulation and envy, but also frustration and criticism. Barbie is the “implastification” of a role model for the modern active, successful, attractive and independent woman. Barbie suggests that life is fun. This contemporary myth implies that being fat is to make one’s laziness, compliance and addiction for food visible. Facts that are mostly regarded as undesirable and linked with great feelings of guilt and shame. (6) Shame is an important component in Beecroft’s performances. This kind of shame could not be understood by a male journalist attending “Show” in 1998, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. His perception of shame would have been to disturb the perfection of the spatial composition and of the girls’ bodies, scarcely dressed in Gucci bikinis and M. Blahnik stilettos. To introduce a grotesque and misfitting element, such as Gucci’s designer naked, wearing high heels. (7) This is not surprising, as the kind of shame thematised by the artist, to become painfully aware of one’s own imperfection, is essentially feminine.

The White, the Blonde and the Icon

With the increasing awareness for dissection during Renaissance, the question about gender and sex had to be raised anew. Biologically there was only one sex proven by dissection, because they mistook the similitude of the male and female genitals for an analogy. Socially, this was unacceptable. It was clear that a penis was regarded as status symbol and linked to a privileged social position. (8) More or less at the same time, other races than the white were being studied scientifically and regarded as subordinated even to white women. People living with a too strong sex-drive for their puritanical standards, closer to animals. The idea of white superiority is still an issue (it had to be proved by Science that genetically there is no difference between races). Barbie’s essential whiteness and Vanessa Beecroft’s preference for alabaster skin for her “living material“ is no coincidence. Barbie has in small proportions Black, Asian, and Hispanic representatives. But these are a minority and do not fit into this image of perfection and superiority. They can be Barbie’s friends, but they will never be like Barbie. Nearly every Barbie doll comes out in a white version, which is the racially unmarked and generally taken for granted version. This is also pointed out by an advertising text found on one of the packages. It stipulates that the doll is made of sturdy flesh-tone vinyl plastic. (9) Beecroft applying glossy body make-up on her model’s skin increases this flesh-tone and plastic-look-alike effect. It makes the skin look more uniform and less bare, accentuating even further the physical resemblance of the chosen girls. In some performances, this doll-look is enhanced by the use of same coloured wigs, as for instance in one performance called “A Blonde Dream”. (10) The blonde (almost contemporary to Barbie and Vanessa Beecroft) was born from the Hollywood productions of the fifties. Blonde stands for hot, hygienic, pulp, fun, among other attributes. The ultimate blonde is the most artificial “platinum blonde”. Her appearance has to be completed by make-up and dramatic clothes, if she wants to avoid looking ridiculous. (11) This remains equally true for Barbie with her right outfit for every occasion and her ever-lasting, never-fading make-up and smile. It is hard to tell which of the blondes appearing on the big screen was the first one, but this is not important, because they are virtually exchangeable and therefore fulfil the same function. Their identity is merely the same: to be blonde. (12) In Beecroft’s performances, the quality of her choice of girls results from the interplay between similarity and minimal differences. This leaves enough space for the spectator to fantasise about their identity and to pick out his favourite. This is only possible because they are being deprived from their personality and reduced to a pure iconographic presence. Icons being defined as known by everyone, Barbie certainly is an icon, while Vanessa Beecroft has restricted her status to the Art world. The girls she uses, work as her surrogate and constitute her public image as an Artist (VB generally stands for “hot naked babes” in the public eye). The girls have the body she fought for and the youth she is losing.

Seduction, Deception and Disintegration

Icons, such as film stars or Barbie are today among the few collective remains of seduction. They are a mythical remain in a period almost incapable of producing great myths or figures of seduction. The essence of the icon is its artifice. It is nothing but appearance and uses as its tool glamour. Glamour composed of make-up, to hide the face behind a more beautiful one, and fashion to enhance the body to an object of luxury and unreachable desire. Such is the power of the sex object, using the prostitution of signs, to move beyond sex and attain seduction. Using the quality of signs lying in the ability to appear and vanish when it is least expected. A simple artificial stroke, that suppresses all natural expression. (13) It is the materialised expression of women’s opacity in contrast to masculine (sexual) transparency and abstraction. This is also one of the reasons why Vanessa Beecroft chooses almost exclusively women for her work. These women may neither talk nor interact with the audience. They are reduced to physical presence but psychological unavailability. (14) Bodies to produce desires in order to deceive them, because their fulfillment would be their destruction. It is a game played with the public where the girls must die as reality and be restored as illusions. This strategy of illusion is also one of deception. The kind of deception represented by another Renaissance invention: the “trompe l’oeil”. The figures in the “trompe l’oeil” are like the girls, ravished of their reality. Looking at a “trompe l’oeil”, we are bewitched by its missing dimension, where the objects represented lose themselves in appearance, in the seduction of their own image. Things then do not want to look natural or real but on the contrary falser than false. This is the essence of every artifice. Then reality loses itself. There is no reality other than its perception. Hence reality is just another cultural construct.

Things in the “trompe l’oeil“ flee before the gaze, with a light that seems to come from another world and shadows that are unable to give them a realistic third dimension. If “Trompe l’oeil” is used in architecture, in form of wall paintings, it actualises a space by the means of simulation, a space within a space. No windows, no natural light, everything is constructed. The painted figures have no meaning in themselves. Their only purpose is to fuse into reality and deceive our perception of the real space. (15) In her performances, Vanessa Beecroft tries to reproduce a “trompe l’oeil” of living flesh, which doesn’t have a meaning in itself. The models bathed in a pool of artificial light, merge with the otherwise naked gallery-space. The girls and the audience share the same room, but not the same space. The models’ passivity is only broken by their act of being looked at. Beecroft’s performances then are non-performances. Because nothing other than the gaze of the spectator happens. (16) In his street-clothes, next to the nude and semi-nude women, the spectator is stripped-bare in the way he chooses to react to their omnipresence. The public is deceived in his expectation that something will happen. Nothing will happen. Except for slowly emerging traces of boredom, pain or fatigue on the model’s faces, having to stand there for hours on their high heels. This is where Vanessa Beecroft, the cool commander of signs, will lose her power. Unlike Barbie or the “trompe l’oeil”, the quality of the used material is to be living and above all, human. The spell cast over the audience loses its grip, while the objects of desire leave their existence as statues to drop one by one on the polished floor. Beecroft’s carefully constructed realm then slowly collapses and leaves as only residue a disintegrated constellation of tired individuals.

Ephemerity is our destiny. Since Renaissance we have tried hard to escape this fate. We still try, restless, and continue to fail. Films are bound to scratch and burn, Barbie to be dismembered by children overenthusiastic dressing and undressing her, paintings to fade exposed to the sun and Beecroft’s “Tableaux vivants” to disintegrate, the task required of the girls being too inhuman. Her performances, with this slightly decadent touch, claim to be a phenomenon of the twentieth century, but they have already a long tradition behind them. They are rather a continuation of this cultural heritage than something radically new. Somehow new is our tolerance to push the boundaries of Art further and further, of what can be shown publicly. Renaissance painters had to legitimise representations of naked girls by setting them in a mythological context. Twelve years ago, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs were scandalous. Today Elke Kristufek can masturbate publicly and Vanessa Beecroft put live nudes into galleries.

Not a scandal anymore, it is still a sensation, making headlines. The Artist said in an interview, published in Nova, that she would continue using the same scheme for her work, until the public considers it as normal. White supremacy, although there has been a considerable progress, is the fundament of our modern affluent society. Similarly to our renaissance ancestors, who could not accept socially that there was only one biological sex, we cannot acknowledge total ethnical equality, despite that genetically there is no difference between races, as we continue to exploit other nations economically. But if the day ever arrives when public nudity will be regarded as something normal, the circle will be closed. We will have stopped to associate it automatically with seduction, desire and sexuality. This would mean the end of the mythological fight between seduction (feminine) and production (masculine). We finally would be taking after our denuded native brothers and sisters, we blindly mistook for animals. Vanessa Beecroft, a visionaire and utopist or rather a greedy capitalist, eager to take advantage of our weakness for flesh and sensation?

Notes (1) Vanessa Beecroft, VB 08-36 Performances, Introduction, p.5 (2) Mary F. Rogers, Barbie culture, Emphatic femininity, p.25 and The making of an icon, p.103 (3) Elisabeth Janus, Art forum International, May 1995, Vanessa Beecroft, p.92-93 (4) Nicholas Mirzoeff, Bodyscape, Bodyscapes, p.19/21 and Gill Kirkup, The gendered cyborg, The virtual speculum, p.228 (5) Jean Baudrillard, The consumer society, The body, p.141 (6) Mary F. Rogers, Barbie culture, Emphatic femininity, p.17-18/22 (7) Wayne Koestenbaum, Artforum International, summer 1998, Bikini brief, p.23-24 (8) Thomas Laqueur, Making sex, New science one sex, p.88-90 (9) Mary f. Rogers, Barbie culture, Sexuality and race in Barbie’s world, p.48 (10) Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, Flash Art,Summer 1995, Vanessa Beecroft, p.118-119 (11) Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, The histerical male, Blondes, p.80 (12) Arthur and Mariluoise Kroker, The histerical male,Blondes, p.73-74 (13) Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, The effigy of the seductress, p.92-94 (14) Vanessa Beecroft,VB 08-36 Performances, p.7 (15) Jean Baudrillard, Seduction,Trompe l’oeil or enchanted simulation, p.63-65 (16) Jan Avgikos, Parkett No.56 1999, Let the pictures do the talking, p.107 Bibliography Badinter Elisabeth, L‘un est l‘autre, Editions Flammarion, Paris 1989 Baudrillard Jean, Seduction, St. Martin‘s Press, New York 1990 (Editions Gallilée, Paris 1979) Baudrillard Jean, The consumer society. Sage Publications,London 1998 (Editions Denoel, Paris 1970) Beecroft Vanessa, VB 08-36 Performances, Hatje Cantz Publishers, Ostfilden-Ruit 2000 Brooks Ann, Postfeminisms, Routledge, London 1997 Kirkup Gill, The gendered cyborg, Routledge, London 2000 Kroker Arthur and Mariluise, The histerical male, Macmillian Education LTD, London 1991 Laqueur Thomas, Making sex, Harvard University Press, London 1990 Mizoeff Nicholas, Bodyscape, Routledge, London 1995 Rogers Mary F., Barbie culture, Sage Publication, London 1999 Revues and Magazines Artforum international, No.39, November 2000, p.153 Artforum International, No.10, Summer1998, p.23-24 Artforum International, May 1995, p.92-93 Art Press, No.221, February 1997, p.69 Flash Art, No.183, Summer 1995, p.118-119 Make, No.88, June/August 2000, p.31-32 New Art Examiner, April 1996, p.44 Parkett, No.56, 1999, p.98-105